


We Shall Remain in Friendship

by spuffyduds



Category: Slings & Arrows
Genre: Blanket Permission, Gen, Male-Female Friendship, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 18:09:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,449
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/600656
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spuffyduds/pseuds/spuffyduds
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Anna and Geoffrey have a history.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We Shall Remain in Friendship

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DesireeArmfeldt](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesireeArmfeldt/gifts).



Anna had thought that putting her fresh new business degree to work in an internship in the arts sounded fun. A bit less dreary than some of the options available to her; the chance to meet some interesting people, see some theater.

But now she's working late nights and through lunches because the other people in the office seem entirely happy to dump everything on the intern and take smoke breaks for the majority of the day, and Mr. Welles is terrifying, and all the actresses are gorgeous and glamorous and even the other women working in the office seem confident and sleek and Anna feels mousy and...beige in her little business suits with the floppy little bow at the neck. They looked so professional when she _bought_ them.

And one morning a few days into her internship, Mr. Welles blasts through the office, plops a cast list down on her desk to go into the newest brochure, and then says, "Fuck, I didn't give props the prop list, here, you take it," and disappears again before she can ask where the props department _is_.

She looks around. Everyone else is, unsurprisingly, on a smoke break. She mutters something under her breath about how they occasionally take workbreaks in their smokeday, and goes hunting for the props department.

Twenty minutes later she's quite lost. The building doesn't look big enough to have this much of a warren of halls in the basement, but thus far she's opened a door that led her to a room full of looming bits of sets, with a coffin leaned up against one wall; a door that led to a bathroom with no less than five rat traps primed and ready--she doesn't want to think about that one too much--and a door that led to a broom closet in which, among the brooms, a small angry-looking man was sitting in a trash can. "Excuse me," she said, and closed the door. She _hopes_ he's rehearsing Beckett. 

She keeps opening random doors because none of them have any goddamn _signs_ on them; apparently in the arts world one is just magically supposed to know where everything _is_. Probably everyone does except _her_ , and then she eases open another door--she's gotten skittish about just throwing them open after trash can man--to find what appears to be a dressing room, with a beautiful man and a cute woman on the couch, kissing, his hand up her shirt. 

Anna gapes, and stands there for a moment trying to imagine what play they are working on, and then realizes that they are not rehearsing a love scene, they are _having a love scene._ She gasps at her own idiocy, and then they look _up_. The woman yelps and sits up, tugging his hand out of her shirt, and the man jumps up to block her view of the woman, and snarls "Fuck _off_."

And, horribly, Anna bursts into tears. She's homesick, and she misses school where she was _good_ at everything, and everyone here is dreadful, and that is just one "fuck off" over the line, and she takes off running.

She expects to suddenly tumble into an orchestra pit or something, but miraculously after a few random turns she finds herself at the stairs.

She makes her way to the ladies' room, cleans up a little--crying makes her blotchy. She's still got the props list, somewhat crumpled and damp in one fist. 

When she steps out of the room, oh dear god, there is the man from the couch, emerging from the office across the way. Anna opens her mouth to apologize, but he is touching fingertips to forelock and bowing slightly, saying, "My name is Geoffrey Tennant, and I am an ass."

"No, no, I'm sorry I walked in--I didn't mean--"

"An obvious accident, to which I overreacted because Ellen was startled and that hammered my chivalry reflex. Let me take you out to lunch."

Which is how they end up at the local pub, because to _hell_ with working through lunch again, and somewhat to her astonishment Geoffrey really seems to listen as she pours out her woes.

When she's done he nods and hmmmms, gets up to grab them another round from the bar, and sits back down with their beer.

"Two things, Anna" he says. "One, after ten minutes I can tell you've got more brains than the rest of the office put together, and you should be running it."

"I'm just an intern, even if something permanent opens up I don't think I _want_ to stay--"

"We _need_ you," he says. "Seriously. Brains. And you obviously actually like the theater--nobody else on the business end of things would recognize a Beckett in a broom closet if it Becketted them on the ass. Last summer they sent out a press release about our upcoming production of 'Romeo and Julius,'" he says, and Anna gets a little beer up her nose.

"Two," Geoffrey says. "The way to end up running the office is to get Oliver to _notice_ how good you are, and Oliver's not going to notice you at all unless you, metaphorically, bite." 

He writes a script to use on Mr. Welles on a bar napkin, makes her rehearse it, critiques her delivery, even makes her work on projecting from her diaphragm until she's blasting it out and other people in the pub are staring. He walks her back to the theater and tells her to break a leg. 

And she marches into the office, finds Mr. Welles at his desk, drops the slightly-crumpled props list in front of him, and thunders, "Next time you want me to go to the FUCKING props office, you have got to FUCKING tell me WHERE THE FUCK IT IS."

He just blinks at her for a moment and she has a horrible flash of _oh dear god Geoffrey was setting me up to get FIRED because I walked in on them_ and then, hallelujah, Mr. Welles breaks out laughing.

"You're the intern, aren't you?" he says. "I'm shit at remembering faces, thought you were old guard, sorry. Props is down the stairs, fourth door on the left."

"THANK you," she says, and grabs the paper back up, and as she strides out (" _Stride_ , don't walk," Geoffrey'd said. "You are a _warrior_.") Mr. Welles calls after her, "Not forgetting _you_ again!"

And when her internship is up she gets offered a full-time position.

********************************************************

The next couple of years she and Geoffrey are both rising rapidly through the ranks in their respective parts of the theatre, and, unlikely as it seems to Anna sometimes, Geoffrey becomes and stays her best friend. Maybe they're so comfortable together because, since she came upon him first in flagrante delicto with Ellen, there's never even the slightest whiff of romantic interest on her part; she can appreciate how beautiful he is, but in a non-personal, art-appreciation sort of way. Whatever the reason, they frequent the pub; they bitch to each other about directors attempting to change blocking at the dress rehearsal, and actors showing up stoned, and the rest of the office staff apparently being entirely incapable of correctly deploying apostrophes.

When Geoffrey falls apart, Anna can hardly bear it. She spends the next week at work fielding calls from ticket holders who are furious that they didn't see all of Hamlet, and then from ticket holders who are furious that they saw all of Hamlet with an understudy. And she spends her evenings visiting Geoffrey--they've only allowed him a very short visitor list, and as far as she can tell, she's the only one from New Burbage that he put on it.

His lucidity comes and goes, and it's miserable to watch, but she keeps going back.

Until the evening when he's pacing and reciting bits of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" in a high-pitched voice at super speed. He reminds Anna of when she used to play her childhood LP's on 45, so that everyone sounded like chipmunks. It's upsetting.

And then he suddenly stops, really looks at her; his face clears, he's Geoffrey again. That's even more upsetting, because it never lasts.

"I can't," he says, softly, in Geoffrey's lovely, normal voice. "I can't see you anymore. It's too--it reminds me too much of when everything was good. I can't."

Anna wants to argue with him, but she can see in his face that it's true.

She gives him one last hug. He smells all wrong, of institutional soap.

"Come back to us someday," she says, and he buries his face in her neck and mumbles, "I'll try."

\---end---

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [We Shall Remain In Friendship [PODFIC]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4307793) by [DesireeArmfeldtPodfic (DesireeArmfeldt)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesireeArmfeldt/pseuds/DesireeArmfeldtPodfic)




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